Is it possible to incorporate data reshaping into the Tableau Extract Engine?

Created on May 22, 2013 8:53 AM by
John Mazur- Last Modified: Apr 7, 2015 9:05 AM

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Has anyone at Tableau Software ever thought of incorporating the ability to reshape a table as part of the Tableau Extract Engine’s capabilities? I don't know if that is at all practical or possible but our Institutional Research office uses the Microsoft Excel Add-in quite often. This tool is invaluable but I don’t find it particularly convenient to move data to and from Excel every time you want to conduct a reshape of table data. We have not attempted to build our own custom reshaping queries for each of our survey databases but the temptation is growing strong especially because we want to have a more dynamic data collection and reporting cycle.

Reshaped tables are very efficient when reporting frequencies and cross-tabulations of, typically, survey data. The idea proposed is to create an integrated application that would offer Tableau Desktop users the option to create an extract of a reshaped table. This facility would allow users to have the flexibility to designate (and change) as many variables (columns) needed to behave both as a dimension (DIM) and answer for every respondent question-answer combination. Did I just confuse the issue?